Paralysis by Analysis - 10 November 2000

In a nation which believes, with the Founding Fathers, that every problem of human life can be solved in the law and with the descent on the state of Florida of 70 lawyers to decide - heaven knows when - the legality of the vote in one of 67 counties, it would be an act of saintly magnanimity for any Democrat in his right mind to accept a Bush majority of a few hundred in nearly 100 million votes.

So I'm pretty sure that listeners in Europe, India, everywhere - perhaps even New Zealand, which airs these words on Tuesdays - will not know any more than we do who is to be the next President of the United States.

However, this talk would have been no different whichever man had won. The political prospect is the same - of a president without a shadow of a mandate, a Congress so stalemated, that we could face a deadlock in democratic government.

But who first is responsible for the absurdly close electoral vote? Or put it another way. Why did Vice-President Gore fail to do what every incumbent party has done in history during a roaring prosperity - go roaring back into the White House?

I believe part of the answer may lie with a man I've never talked about before, a third presidential candidate who got only 3% of the national vote but 7% in three Western states that Governor Bush had to win and did win but by a very fine margin.

A few weeks before the election there was a sudden and widespread national interest, and among the Democrats concerned, about the possible role of Mr Ralph Nader - the environmentalist candidate - as a spoiler.

Mr Nader is rather old to be taken for the first time as a serious threat to one of the two parties.

At 64 he's older than Franklin Roosevelt was when he died after an unprecedented four terms in the White House.

For at least 30 of those years Mr Nader, a lawyer, has persisted in a crusade which at times was as lonely as that of John the Baptist.

He became first concerned about the possible hazards to the safety of motorists from the design of the cars themselves.

He moved on to weightier matters - to campaign for the protection of the consumer in all kinds of things. Especially he pioneered what became a national protest against the industrial pollution of rivers and lakes and eventually the atmosphere itself.

Mr Nader has written a whole series of books which could have carried the title of one of them - Taming the Grand Corporation.

Without Mr Nader and his backing by the Democrats, most notably by Vice-President Gore, we might never have had the Environmental Protection Act which cleansed the Great Lakes and the famous rivers and which disciplines big business at every turn - some of its victims say to the point of stifling business itself.

There is a kind of Savonarola ascetic passion to Mr Nader that attracts true environmentalists but also radicals of all stripes and ages. Not enough, you might say, to be any threat to Governor Bush or to Vice-President Gore.

You would be wrong about Mr Gore but you'd be right about Governor Bush who rejoices, or rejoiced, in the possibility that Mr Nader would take the more left-leaning voters away from Mr Gore's liberal backing, that they would pass over to Governor Bush and amount to the straw that broke the camel's back.

Well maybe that's what happened and it's easy and comfortable now to say we never thought it would. We did and the fears were so lively among the Democrats that several million dollars were spent in last minute television advertisements warning all true Democrats "Vote for Nader and elect Bush".

The role of spoiler has been decisive in several American presidential elections. After all who put Bill Clinton in the White House?

Not the 44 millions who voted for him. Fifty eight millions voted against him.

Of those, 19 million that would have been most likely to go to President Bush went instead to that cocky, folksy little Texan, a true third party rebel with an amazingly populist appeal - Ross Perot.

I should say that Mr Nader's three percentage of the actual final vote is out of all proportion to his national reputation as a serious politician.

If he died tomorrow he would have left behind more substantial legislation than most congressmen I can think of.

He knows this and the amplifying of this knowledge in the applause of his thousands of disciples has induced in him a confidence bordering on megalomania.

He rejoiced, nay he rollicked, in the notion of taking votes away from Mr Gore.

He appeared to delight in the prospect of a Bush presidency because he believed it would be so bad, so true to the caricatures he paints of the big bad guys - namely of corporate America - that in 2004 America will rise and revolt and the Nader trumpet will be seen to have heralded the arrival of a radical saviour - non other than Ralph Nader himself.

This, to most people, is an absurd fantasy or a practical impossibility. To one national newspaper: "A dangerously mischievous game." A surprising comment that's worth a moment's thought.

It is not unknown in the history of revolutions - look at Algeria, Russia, Abyssinia, France even - for the most radical party, often the smallest, to urge the support of a rigid status quo and the most conservative policies so as to make the reaction when it comes all the more violent and irrevocable.

A recent American historian has shown that on the eve of the French Revolution, France had just about the most liberal regime it had ever had, wildly distinct from the never-to-be-erased pictures of Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlisle, the Scarlet Pimpernel and many other melodramas.

In a word, Mr Nader seems to be so delighted with discovering the warmth of his idolaters that he is in danger of hubris, of self-pride, which turns popular heroes into tragic heroes.

Now this may all be nonsense or it may be an omen of troubled times in Washington and beyond in the next four years.

Mr Nader is not alone in having his eye, even now, on 2004.

Consider the lackadaisical manner in which Senator McCain fulfilled his promise to campaign for Governor Bush.

I think he appeared, nonchalantly, two or three times on the road for Bush though he spoke up for 70 Republican congressional candidates - potential allies four years from now.

In the result I believe we shall soon come to hear the opening salvo in the McCain campaign of 2004.

For throughout the hectic campaign neither Mr Gore nor Mr Bush paid more than a lick of lip service to abolishing the system which got them where they were, namely the wholesale use of soft money, that's to say unlimited money legally allowed for a party's running expenses which is then used under the counter to finance the television promotion of a single candidate.

Senator McCain came to national fame by his powerful one note insistence on the abolition of this general and corrupt system of campaign financing.

But the pros saw their livelihood and their backing down the drain and rallied round the nomination of two men, one of whom thought the system was just fine, the other - Vice President Gore - said yes, yes it was awful it should be reformed but let's keep it just this one more time.

Senator McCain, in the wake of his defeat by Governor Bush in the Republican primaries, announced that the first thing he would do at the first session of the 2001 Senate would be to reintroduce his Campaign Finance Bill which was killed off the first time.

If Mr Nader did indeed tip the scales, how come the scales were so unbelievably balanced that it took only the fingertip of an intruder to unbalance them?

We have a neat expression in golf to describe the plight of a golfer, a kind of golfer who, when he's facing any putt longer than a few feet bends down and carefully guesses at the line of the putt.

He then stands up - feet wide apart holding his club out at the vertical - he shuts one eye, then the other. This is called plumb bobbing.

He goes round the hole and bends down again and scans it from the other side.

Finally he walks back, takes three or four or five sideways glances at the hole and putts - and most often misses.

Once at Augusta, Georgia, I saw two famous players take nine minutes to putt out from the moment they approached the green.

The crowd was very patient, no Cockney heckling, no sarcastic Scottish caddy.

Americans have a deep faith in careful statistical analysis and throughout the last weeks of the election the voters were riddled with every sort of question - possible motive for voting, possible influence - hundreds of ingenious doubts were planted, all made possible by the wonders of the computer.

I believe the stalemate was due to this statistical suffocation as much as anything, driving the voters into a numbness of indecision and I believe the phrase to describe their condition is the one we use about the golfer going through that nervous analytical process.

The process is called "paralysis by analysis."

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